The Memory of Water

⁸ DIVINE DICTATION

There is a pleasure and pain in writing that is, ironically, difficult to put into words. When you are struggling to tap into the force it can feel like you will never get there again, that the muse has abandoned you, for bad behaviour, or just for kicks (muses have distorted senses of humour) and, if this happens enough, you can end up throwing your laptop out of the window and swearing off writing for life. And then one day – when far away from pen and paper, on the M1 highway or at a dinner party – something will come to you which you know is good, you know is original and fresh and important. You end up in the emergency lane, hazard lights flashing, ransacking the cubby-hole for something, anything, to write with, or the guest bathroom, scratching down sentences on double ply with borrowed eyeliner while other guests knock down the door. Divine dictation. The feeling that comes with it, intimate and sexy, pen on paper like lips on skin, a heat that starts in your pelvis and travels upwards, outwards, not so much a bolt as a current. You are turned on: physically, psychologically, spiritually. Nothing beats this feeling. Well, very few things beat this feeling.

I haven’t had it in a while. I keep hoping that my muse will rescue me, lift me out of this pit of desperation. I try to have faith but when you show up to the page every day for over a year and get nothing, you start to feel a little bereft. I’ve tried to fake it, tried to force it, but that never gets me past a couple of hundred bad words. I gaze at copies of my published work and wonder where the hell all those sentences came from. And what a schmuck I was, taking it all for granted. The Catastrophe of Success, as Tennessee puts it, embalmed by fame… and then, nothing. The cold abyss.

This blankness, this snowstorm, this nothingness makes me reckless. I start thinking I should do more, travel more, taste more, try more, fuck more. I am cast adrift in pages and pages of white paper and I realise that I will do whatever it takes to get me writing again.